NitoMurray wrote:But Austin do you also remember the simple magic missile that destroyed 5 enemies at once rather easily? Even the smallest and most simple spells can decimate nearly a half dozen men whilst a fireball can quite literally blow a hole through a wall or tear down a building/tower.

Compare that, a warrior who struggles vs 4 enemies against a mage who can throw fireballs destroying city defenses and even the simple spells capable of taking out half dozen troops. \

The stagger in Dark souls works, but that's because it's at an intended scale and intentionally punishing you for being hit. The idea of that game is after all to continue to fail until you've replayed so many times you see that level when you close your eyes. For a larger RTS scale it would break the game and for many RPG's it doesn't work due to scale. In Dark Souls you're normally fighting 1-2 at a time, sometimes more. In this you'll fight dozens. It simply wouldn't work other than to cause a permanent stagger affect.

I do understand the importance and usefulness of stagger as a mechanic (after all, it's a cheap way to increase difficulty). Perhaps adding in a timer to it, so there is a pause in between staggers that would allow a player to dodge whilst disabling block?

My personal take on stagger is it should be a physics mechanic based on weight. Every race has a set weight, and so does the armour and weapons they wear. When you're characters weight + strength is greater than the dexterity/poise of the enemy, they stagger (FYI this is how it works on Dark Souls for anyone struggling with stagger. Havel's basically makes you immune for example to even most boss staggers). So this means a swarm of goblins won't make your might warrior king stagger - but a ogre or something more meaty would nearly always whilst an orc has a chance to. This seems like a nicer and more sensible balance.

Nito I actually do not remember about the beginner spell. but I do understand what you mean and Maybe we should make an actual discussion for this in general discussions so we can have more opinions on this and have a greater idea on what would be a good idea to perhaps fix this. We both know this isn't the final version and there will be many many revisions to the combat system and the balancing and the unbalancing of certain skills and things. So would you be alright with creating a general discussion? I'm sure this conversation will generate many opinions and a conversation much needed for the forum by more then you and I. I do however get what you're talking about (I believe) and I do agree that the mage seems overpowered in its current state and maybe for the staggering you could have that pause where you could try and dodge it would be very helpful and could give some balancing to the staggering problem we seem to notice.

(also thanks I was pretty confused on that dark souls thing and yes I do see on how the two system are different.)